History of the Collection

The nucleus of the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts & Popular Culture, totaling more than 5,000 items, encompasses paintings, sculptures, graphic works of art, original manuscripts and documents, important costumes, toys, film memorabilia, and cartoon & animation art, all of the finest caliber and the product of discerning eyes.

The Museum's painting collections span the last 700 years of Art History and represent that period's major art movements, starting with Byzantine icons circa 1325, continuing through the Renaissance and Mannerist centuries, leading to a concentration in the 19th Century / Victorian period including Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism & Surrealism, and Modern & Contemporary works. The Museum holds an especially interesting collection of Trompe L’Oeil paintings which artfully play with viewer perceptions of the apparent presence on the canvas of ordinary objects in commonplace settings, which, as the French term translates, "fools the eye", making these paintings the original virtual reality.

Graphic works include woodcuts, etchings, and among the best lithographic images ever produced – those during La Belle Epoque, that period of time starting in the later quarter of the 19th Century and running up to the beginning of World War I, when everything in Art was changed, a consequence of the war machines of technology ushering us all into the modern world.

The fascinating world of the Circus and related field of Magic is represented in the Museum’s collection by engaging posters depicting everything from breath-taking feats of acrobatic artistry to awe-inspiring acts of alchemy to those human oddities whose fame and fortune made them a staple at sideshows. The Museum is also privileged to own the performance archive of the 19th Century American Equilibrist Edward Earle, including his beautifully-sequined stage costumes and the rare original manuscripts of circus music scores which accompanied his performances throughout the world.

The Museum's American Folk Art collection represents the artful imagery created during our country's formative years, a time when much of the population was illiterate, necessitating creative artistic solutions to this challenge, to be found in the iconic symbols incorporated into trade signs , and those often-poignant symbols which also found their way into individual and group portraits of the largely-agrarian populace, painted by unschooled itinerant limners, before photography came into common usage.

From its earliest origins in France (Lumiere Brothers) and the United States (Thomas Edison), the moving image continues to be a huge influence on culture (both good and bad).  The Museum's collection holds among the earliest film posters and advertising, documenting cinema in its nascent stage, when its imagery was rich and silence spoke volumes.   Of particular note were early German films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu - A Symphony of Terror (1922) and Metropolis (1926), the latter widely-recognized as the first major Science Fiction film, produced only five years after the term "robot" first made its way into human consciousness from Czech writer Karel Čapek 's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a (wo)man-machine character Fritz Lang made iconic in Metropolis.  With film posters of all sizes (three-sheets, one sheets, half-sheets, inserts and lobby cards), glass coming attraction slides, and movie stills the Museum relates the rich history of the art of film.

A coincident and parallel development in the history of the moving image is that of cartoon animation and the Museum's collection includes perhaps the world's most comprehensive collection of animation art from the legendary Fleischer Studios (1921-1942).  As Walt Disney's only serious competitor at the time, Max Fleischer, his brothers and a sister ran the studio (under the Paramount Pictures umbrella) and produced some of the world's most beloved and recognizable cartoon character cartoons (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman), which are also universally-recognized and revered by cartoon art historians as some of the most inventive cartoons ever produced.  The Museum's extensive Animation Art holdings include a revealing Fleischer Studios Animation Training Handbook, internal company newsletters, original cartoon scripts, character model sheets, animation drawings, storyboards, cartoon cels, original cartoon background paintings, and an important collection of movie posters and lobby cards advertising its innovative catalog, which heavily incorporated into its imagery the concepts of Surrealism and Jazz, paralleling the corresponding then-contemporaneous movements in fine art and music in the 1920 and 30s.  

Specializing in the music of the 1960s and the black American music that inspired it, the Museum's Popular Music collection is most notable for its important original manuscript documents relating to the birth of the Beatles.   From an original business card for the Quarrymen (the 1957-1960 earliest incarnation of the John- Paul-George union), to three fascinating 1960 draft letters of "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe documenting their name change from The Quarrymen to The Beatals (the original spelling of the group's name) offering the group's services at audition,, to another historic name change also documenting the now-Beatles' first legendary trip to Hamburg,, to the Beatles' last concert poster at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, to George Harrison's important self-penned original lyrics and music score for Indian instruments to his masterful "Within You / Without You" (from the best known Beatles LP Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), to John Lennon's 1975 often-scathing track-by-track commentary on the about-to-be released 1962 recordings of The Beatles playing in the Hamburg red-light district, the Museum's collection of early Beatles original documents is unparalleled.